The Light.

      Careful positioning of building elements, particularly windows in respect of prevailing wind directions and the movements of the sun will reduce the need for air conditioning and central heating, allowing the light in to the gallery space. Very often, the galleries and museums create an iconic structure, that attracts people into museums. A clever way of lighting up the exterior during the night time persuades the passers by to come back the next day.
     "Closed" exhibition spaces with no day light give far greater control to the designer. Where there are no competing views of a gallery's surroundings, the visitor is forced to focus purely on the exhibition and its message. After roughly an hour the closed environment, especially where the light level is very low can become oppressive for visitors. The designers should therefore plan the rest stops. For example, Guinness Storehouse in Dublin is a mostly closed narrative journey that progress up the building and ends with a high-level panoramic view of the city.

Many contemporary designers of exhibition lighting learned their trade in the theatre, and the parallels between two disciplines are obvious. In both the light changes are applied to emphasise changes in the mood and tone. Daylight is very powerful compared to the most artificial light. Despite the movements of sun is predicted, one can never tell how the light will act during the day, for example, low clouds and rain will affect the lighting effects. Until artificial lighting was readily available, nearly all museums were lit through skylights above the exhibition hall, with light often filtering through central atrium to the floor below. Temporary shows are prone to be quickly made, and very often the designers do not even consider the natural lighting, so they usually prefer to block the light  and create a completely artificial environment. For most of the time the light focus on display is brighter than the general background light, and it is called Accent light. Ambient light describes the light thrown into walls creating and overall brightness. Wall-wash enables the designers to light the whole wall relatively evenly. Wall-wash lights installed in sequence make it possible to create a wide continuos spread of light across long walls.

 accent light

Wall-wash lighting

Visitors prefer ambient light, it is more comfortable then spotlight though less dramatic. There are 4 ways of lighting the 3D object. 1- From above with one lamp - very dramatic, allows to see the object properly only from one side. 2 - Side lighting, when the object is lit from two sides.  3 - Isometric, when there are 3 lamps. 4 - Underside, when the object is lit from below.

Feature lighting allows the designer to emphasise the shape and a 3 demential structure of the area, (the lights that are placed in the tops corner of the room) while accent light tends to break the 3 demential space by creating the light pools. LED lamps allow to see the transparent images and underline the silhouette of the object. Coloured filters, colour the space, they are extremely popular in exhibitions about science or virtual reality. A good example would be Wetland Museum in Hong Kong.  

LED light. Great Expectations by Casson Mann

Projector lights are used to project signs, pattern and images into the flat surface of a floor. Edge lighting - the lamp, usually fluorescent, is placed to the edge of a translucent glass to create a glow around the display. The designer fills the box behind the surface with light, using soft diffuse lamps like fluorescent tubes. Boxes used for this are usually painted white to give maximum reflection.  Parcan- light goes around a volume or a beam to which the letters or objects or some other kind of features attached. 

Magic carpets by Miguel Chevalier 

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/interactive-light-display-turns-moroccan-church-into-magic-carpets

Open road tour, Pentagram

 London Transport Museum

Drawing fashion at Design Museum by Carmody Groarke (6 March 2011.)

http://www.dezeen.com/2010/11/18/drawing-fashion-at-the-design-museum-by-carmody-groarke/

Exhibition Design. History of Exhibition design. The role of a visitor

 I have found a book by Philip Hughes "Exhibition Design". It rises and answers (gives advises) to some very interesting questions concerning to the ways making the exhibition.

Exhibition design and the creation of public displays is an increasingly significant part of life in all areas of the globe. Every year brings new display halls, big enough to accommodate fleets of airships.
Some museums bring fame and attract thousands of tourists to the area, one of the best examples is Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehry. It has a very interesting combination of natural and artificial lighten spaces. The unusual shape works like a manifesto (here lives art), people want to visit the Museum even after a short glance on a building. This is a very modern interpretation on how the building for art exhibition should look like. In 18-19 even the beginning of 20th century, most of the museum felt bound to show as many artefacts as they could physically cram into display spaces, while in contemporary galleries and museums a lot of space and light is given to every picture so it makes a significant sense.

 Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao

Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao

The other great example is Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC, that attracts 24 million visitors per year (Tate Modern in comparison attracts only 5 million visitors). In Smithsonian complex there are more then 136 millions of objects. It hardly needs saying that, worldwide, the appetite for exhibitions and therefore exhibition design increases. Exhibition design aims to demonstrate the tools, some of the world's most successful designers do everything to make an exhibition experience more engaging and memorable. 

Smithonian Air and Space Museum

The History of the Exhibition Design

Display is an innate element of human behaviour, constantly practiced in our daily lives. Most houses have casual arrangements of treasures, images and awards in their "living" rooms. Religious buildings such as churches and temples are powerful examples of how techniques of display can be most skilfully employed. Indeed many museum and exhibition spaces often have something of the atmosphere of a temple, which they often resemble physically.

Museum and galleries mainly evolved out of the collections of rich patrons, whose curiosities and artefacts were mostly shown to the other wealthy families. At the end of the eighteen century, the number of such collections were combined to organised for a public display. Museum were built for dual purpose: to accommodate the artefacts and to give the increasingly literate and self-educating population a chance to explore the wonders and learn something new about the world. The UK first dedicated public art gallery was Dulwich Picture Gallery. The gallery proved to be an important precedent for architects and designers of gallery spaces, demonstrating how the space might look, how the light can be introduced. 

  Dulwich Picture Gallery

 Dulwich Picture Gallery

Very often museums were orientated to provoke and amaze the visitor, so they would collect exotic animals, cultural antiques, arts and other object of interest simply by removing them from the original and natural locations, many artefacts acquired narratives that, through thrilling, had little or no basis in truth. 

Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, housed a revolutionary Crystal Palace which was a substantial milestone in the history of exhibitions and, for that matter, in the intellectual history of Europe. It showed the world a new type of building, revolutionary usage of materials and of course, a very innovative exhibition space.

Crystal Palace 

Crystal Palace

The Evolution of the Modern Display Techniques

Modern display techniques are largely influenced by art and design movements of the early 20th century, principally the development of abstract art and the principles espoused by a vant-garde artists and designers, many of whom studies and taught at the Bauhaus in Germany between 1919-1937. New words: spatial relationship and volume - appeared. Envelope of the gallery, formally treated as an empty shell into which the display was placed, was itself turned into a work of art. The space that grew out of the modernists movement was a minimal environment with empty walls developed at Museum of Modern art (MOMA) in New York. Perhaps the most defining element of MOMA's display legacy was also its simplest. Visitors were encouraged to ignore the artist's historical and social context and to conceder the art separately as an autonomous object. 

Interactive Exhibitions

Starting with 1960th, San Francisco Exploratarium developed an interactive habits that allowed visitors to learn directly from experience and have fun at the same time. This type of learning is good for the kinaesthetic learners, who enjoy in doing something rather then observing. Young visitors has begun to pay less attention to traditional advertising and marketing, and increasingly inhabit the parallel digital community. To maintain their reverence to a new generations, museums and institutions are forced to seek out the virtual habitat in which these consumers reside. The digital experience often leads to a physical visit and seems to encourage rather then discourage visitors. Real exhibition is a robust feature of the modern life and unlikely to be replaced any time soon.

The "like it or leave it" of the past generations, is now replaced by a feedback and comment attitude. Nowadays, anyone who wants to gain a substantial information on particular subject, can go to the exhibition where all the facts are mapped out into a 3 demential journey. 

The Role of the visitor

There are different types of learners: the ones who learn by watching, the ones who learn by hearing, the ones who learn by doing. To accommodate their varied needs, designers and exhibitors create layers of information. Also, very often the designers create layers based on a length of visit- Short, medium or long, also for: Engineers, School kids and Pilots. The expert, is a person who comes to the museum in order to see smth in particular, for these people there should be special facilities in order to research deeper into the topic of their interest.  Frequent travellers are familiar with main landmarks and are interested in different varieties of information, they are motivated by general curiosity. To satisfied the needs of these people, the designers has to plan an infirm end level of enquiry. (explanatory text and videos before the exhibition). Scouts do not know the terrain, but want to pick up the main landmark. These visitors need a highly organised  and rigorous top layer of information.  Orienteers often do not know where to go in the exhibition, they r just looking for something they like. Very ofter orienteers are the people who were brought by someone else and got abandoned in the gallery. Designers have to think about this kind of people just as well. Also galleries stress on the importance of the design for kids, they want to learn while having fun. Very often the designers create a "rabbit hall" the place which is very attractive for kids, so they can be found easily by their parents when lost.

Disobedient Objects, Evita Musical, Sanderson Hotel

"Disobedient objects" exhibition added more understanding to the matter of presenting the object in the atmospheric space. Long rails, physically rather then visually divide the space. It seems like the viewers are captured in a cell, as if the objects should be isolated from the society. I loved the way the objects were presented, the explanation is very clear, with pictures, photos and videos. I think the exhibition could have been better if they added more sound into it, the sound of riot, the sound of people, as the exhibition was quite silent. Also, I wish there were more poster across the room, I am sure I would not have been busy, but rather the information will be more clear (as people go to the riot with hundreds of posters, so the crowd is colourful bright). 

The information is very clear, but the font is horrible, it is hard to read the text. I loved their use of cheap materials ( pressed wood and scaffolding). The exhibition gives the sense of the value to art, out of the street, a "mass art". Whether these posters and objects should be considered as an art and have an artistic value, is a very controversial question.

"Evita" I always try to search for inspiration in different places. This time I got few interesting ideas after watching Evita Musical. I have learned that the space can change the mood and atmosphere in a second just by playing with the colour of light. Red light is the light of anger, suprematism, melted iron, passion, danger. The Show started with a scene in a cinema, people sit over a semi-transparent screen. A good thing about screens is that you can project onto them. So I had an idea that a cafe in Design Museum should be decorated with screens, on which the kitchen design objects would be shown in action. 

Another good example is Sanderson Hotel. The rooms of the hotel are filled with natural light.  Green glass in bathrooms, yellow mirrors, dark purple corridors, dark- cosmos -like elevators. Each room and space was designed carefully to suit the matter and the function of the room. A Purple Bar is meant to be used only by guests of the hotel for relaxation in the dark and cozy atmosphere of the bar. The interior of the purple room looks like a jewellery box from Alice from Wonderland, small chairs, decorated mirrors, granite bar. The main hall is separated on 2 parts: The waiting and a noisy bar areas. Spa zone is connected to a billiard room, it is also a very quiet and relaxing place to be. The hotel has a name on the facade. Morgan Group hotels don't put the name on the building but for Sanderson they had to make an exception and keep it as the building is listed. (The ones who are supposed to be in the hotel, will be there anyway). The target group of society is: creative, artistic people, people from advertising.

The spa area, ambient light, no walls. The whole space is divided by semi-transparent curtains.

The light goes from below, gently and soothing. Water is reflected on the ceiling. Tall ceilings. 

Decompressing room-ellevator

One of the suits: yellow mirror soften the cold greenish light coming from the bathroom and a gloomy greyness coming from the street.

Curtains, a long bar illuminated from the inside. 

The purple bar

Curtains always add theatrical mood to the space.

Tate Britain, what can it give me?

"Late Turner" exhibition is a good example of how the classical gallery looks like. The painting on walls, sketch books and documents are on the table in the middle of the room under a glass cube. Narration, each room brings you to a new stage of life of the painter. I noticed the importance of the colour of the walls. The room painted in yellow was overwhelming, in fact I could not pay a proper attention to drawings and painting. All of a sudden I felt tired. No wonder that nowadays, the interiors of gallery spaces are mostly white, so nothings distracts the viewer from enjoying the work of art.
Light in the gallery is very diffused, it never shines straight in the eyes. One of the examples of lighting is the lamp in Turner Gallery in Tate Britain.

The day light is very important, it saves the electricity, and brings a comfortable light in to the space.(in this case there is a window in the gallery) The window allows the visitors to return to the reality, and surprisingly find themselves in the middle of London, near the river. 

Despite the day light is a key factor of the good lighting in the gallery, the sun rays can be hazard for paintings and other works of art, so the windows on the roof are closed with a semi-transparent fabric to diffuse the light and make it more gentle. Straight sun rays are not welcomed into the gallery space. Special (day light) lamps keep the lighting in balance.

We are working with flooring at the moment. It is very important to engage the floor with the gallery and museum design. The floor can be used to inform people about the year and the style and the theme of a particular room, or tell them to lift up their eyes and look around. I have found these interesting and minimalistic hints on the floor in Tate Britain, almost each room has this numbers to inform the visitors of the period of time the works in that particular room were produced.   

One of the video performances gave me an idea, that maybe the objects themselves should not be even shown in Design Museum, maybe the design process and a shadow of the product on a wall can be enough? In that movie I could not see the ventilator, but I saw its shadow, and it seemed to be just enough. 

In this drawing we can see how Monument column was placed on its current position. We can understand the scale of the structure that had to be built in order to lift the column up. We can see the labour that takes place in each stage of the creation and construction of massive buildings and monuments.

(Exhibition Design by Philip Hughes)

Details

In this blog I am going to look through the Galleries' and the Museums' features that are useful for a presentation of an object (artefact), information, atmosphere.

When objects are placed on a pedestal, so they can be appreciated while being on the eye level of the visitors. Because an object is lifted from the ground, it makes people to question why is it on a pedestal? Then actually understand that the object was carefully designed and put on a pedestal to be appreciated. In the Design Museum ordinary things (things that we use in everyday life) are put on a pedestal. I think, the most important issue nowadays, in the age of technology and machinery, is that people take designed objects for granted without even thinking that all objects we are surrounded by are designed and made by people. Yes, machines build some of the things, but at the same time the machines were build by people. Bridges and buildings, massive and tiny objects, everything is man-made. I think it is important for people to understand that.
There was an exhibition in Victoria and Albert Museum where original sketches of such buildings as St Paul's Cathedral, Big Ben and  London Bridge were presented to a viewer. One of rooms was commemorated to a new structure of King's Cross railway station. The space was presented through drawings, computer generated models and photos with different lighting, though different time of the day. One of the most interesting and strong features of the whole exhibition was a video that showed the building process of King's Cross station.

I think a new design should be very tactile. I think the new Design museum should celebrate hands, process of making and concepts of designed objects."The touch" should become the most important feature of the exhibition. Touch things to feel the texture, to feel the surface and the shape.

 Visitors should see hands during the process of making objects. For example, a performance where professionals come to make things (chairs, plates, glasses) will be shown on screens on which the hands will be shown in every detail, depicting each movement. The museum should celebrate the beauty of hands, their flexibility, their incredible functionality. Here are some examples of art that can be shown in galleries. It reflects my concept of a future gallery and inspires me for future thinking.

http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/dasha-pliska-architecture-odessa

Observation

           I started my research with an idea of visiting as many museums and galleries as possible in order to observe, criticise, underline the features of how the artefacts and objects are presented. The space, the lighting, devices, plans of the exhibitions, ways of communication with the visitor. From those observations I get different ideas of how the Museum should work. + what is a museum in a general sense.
Museum of London offered me a great exposition where an atmosphere of the old London was recreated. They used old artefacts, furniture and materials, added sounds, gave me an opportunity for a brief moment to imagine that I am in the past. Conclusion - environment sometimes is not less important than the artefact itself, sometimes you have to understand the environment in order to understand the object and how it works and how it was used. London Museum has interactive screens and recreated spaces (old huts, olympic games stadium)

          The other museum which inspired me a lot was the Imperial War Museum. It was opened in june after a refurbishment, the curators have made a great job there. As soon as you enter the space, you are overwhelmed with the scene in the main hall. Real life planes and a spaceships are attached to the ceiling. Boats, torpedoes and cars overhang each floor. Circular structure of the exhibition. That gave me an idea that the Museum should be constructed in a way, so the visitors don't need to use a map and they can easily see where to go, and what to see. There should be different levels of understanding the exhibition. Special texts or games for kids, texts for people who are more interested in reading, cinema boxes and recreated environmental sound and scenes. Imperial war museum, despite the small mistakes and inconveniences (sometimes the text is poorly lit, or the artefacts are positioned in a narrow place, so people start to group around it) it is a great example of a modern museum. The exhibition 1st World War and a Secret War as well as Holocaust are good examples of modern technologies use. Interactive boards. A great way of narration through the space of the exhibition.

              In Imperial War Museum I have found a few paintings that impressed me. Their context as well as their story gave me few ideas for the museum of the future. In her painting Flora Lion depicts a factory where the weapons for the war are produced. It made me think about the factories in which the design objects are produced. Why do we have to see a modern chair displayed in Design Museum if we use it in everyday life? The process of manufacturing is smth that has to be shown in the Design Museum, the main hall should be converted into a into a "factory", a stage production. It is interesting to know how the legs are bend, how all the parts of the chair are attached. 

The other work that inspired me was a painting by George Clausen. He depicts another factory space. The light from above reminded me of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. A temple like space. The new Design Museum building should be turned into a design sanctuary. The huge space of the main hall should be  lit by day light coming from the windows above. A future museum can become a temple of design, bringing the design to the altar. A spiritual, mystique atmosphere. A place to think and to witness, observe.

(Hagia Sophia)

(The roof of a new Design Museum )

I have seen this art work in the Town Hall Hotel. It has a very interesting glowing reflecting surface, but if to look at it closer, you will see that the whole surface is made of little stars. The detail that you don't see unless you look closer. That gave me an idea that Design Museum should give visitors an opportunity to see the object in detail. How are the joints made? See materials through a magnifying glass, learn the story of the object. What was it (the shape) inspired by, what does it represent, ect.

The Biggest suite in London in the Town Hall Hotel is a good example of how old listed building can be refurbished to look modern and up to date. (Since we are working with a listed building where a new Design Museum will be moved in 2015th)